The idea that spending more on preventive care will reduce overall health care spending is widely believed and often promoted as a reason to support reform. It’s thought that too many people with chronic illnesses wait until they are truly ill before seeking care, often in emergency rooms, where it costs more. It should follow then that treating diseases earlier, or screening for them before they become more serious, would wind up saving money in the long run.

Unfortunately, almost none of this is true.

Let’s begin with emergency rooms, which many people believed would get less use after passage of the Affordable Care Act. The opposite occurred. It’s not just the A.C.A. The Oregon Medicaid Health Insurance experiment, which randomly chose some uninsured people to get Medicaid before the A.C.A. went into effect, also found that insurance led to increased use of emergency medicine. Massachusetts saw the same effect after it introduced a program to increase the number of insured residents.

Emergency room care is not free, after all. People didn’t always choose it because they couldn’t afford to go to a doctor’s office. They often went there because it was more convenient. When we decreased the cost for people to use that care, many used it more.

That makes the treatment, called Luxturna and made by Spark Therapeutics, the most expensive medicine sold in the U.S., ranked by sticker price.

But Spark CEO Jeff Marrazzo says Luxturna’s ability to restore vision in a small number of people with a defective gene justifies the high cost, particularly because the gene therapy is only injected one time in each eye for a long-term benefit. Many investors expected Spark to charge $1 million or more for Luxturna, so the actual price will be considered a bargain by some.

The recent news that stents inserted in patients with heart disease to keep arteries open work no better than a placebo ought to be shocking. Each year, hundreds of thousands of American patients receive stents for the relief of chest pain, and the cost of the procedure ranges from $11,000 to $41,000 in US hospitals.

But in fact, American doctors routinely prescribe medical treatments that are not based on sound science.

Beautiful. Pure. Natural. Medicine at its pinnacle. Those were the words of Dr. Giuliano Testa this week — the principal investigator of a clinical trial with ten women underway at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas

Beautiful. Pure. Natural. Medicine at its pinnacle. Those were the words of Dr. Giuliano Testa this week — the principal investigator of a clinical trial with ten women underway at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas

Those were the words of Dr. Giuliano Testa this week — the principal investigator of a clinical trial with ten women underway at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.

He was talking about the birth of a baby boy to a mother who underwent a uterus transplant last year. It’s a first in the U.S., but in Sweden, eight babies have been born to mothers with uterus transplants.

Not everyone is celebrating though.

Dr. Testa and his colleague, Dr. Liza Johannesson, who joined the Baylor team from Sweden earlier this year, spoke with All Things Considered host Kelly McEvers about this development. Excerpts of the interview follow, edited for length and clarity.

Vincent Thomas had battled multiple myeloma for quite some time and gone through countless treatments and drug regimens, which weren’t stopping his cancer. He and his family made the decision to go on hospice care. The thing was, his eyesight had failed him

Vincent Thomas had battled multiple myeloma for quite some time and gone through countless treatments and drug regimens, which weren’t stopping his cancer. He and his family made the decision to go on hospice care. The thing was, his eyesight had failed him

The thing was, his eyesight had failed him. He had significant cataracts, or clouding of the lenses, in both eyes. He couldn’t see his family, he couldn’t drive himself to his doctor’s appointments, and this once-fiercely independent man had to learn to depend on others just to cut his food.

He wanted to see his family before he died.

“He was a really hands-on type of person,” his daughter, India Haashim, says. “So it was frustrating for him because he was so used to being independent and working multiple jobs at a time and not relying on people.”

I stared at the email announcing “Your 23andMe results are ready” for several minutes before I had the courage to uncover my genetic health and ancestry secrets.

I was excited to discover whether I was predisposed to be lactose intolerant or consume more caffeine than the average person. However, I was nervous about learning of more serious issues ― like whether my DNA made me more likely to get Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s diseases.

I grew up listening to terrifying stories from great-aunts about what it was like to watch my great-grandmother die from Alzheimer’s at age 62. My relatives wondered if each forgotten vocabulary word was a sign they were getting it, too. Now, for $199, I was going to find out if I had one of the genetic markers that increased my own chances.

Bizarre as this seems, researchers have seen hints of a “mother effect” on blood transfusions before. Half a dozen studies have found that recipients were more likely to die after receiving blood from a woman than from a man — though the biggest and most recent did not

Bizarre as this seems, researchers have seen hints of a “mother effect” on blood transfusions before. Half a dozen studies have found that recipients were more likely to die after receiving blood from a woman than from a man — though the biggest and most recent did not

Men who received a blood transfusion from a woman who had ever been pregnant had a higher risk of dying prematurely than men who got blood from a man or a never-pregnant woman, scientists reported on Tuesday.

Tell me more:

Bizarre as this seems, researchers have seen hints of a “mother effect” on blood transfusions before. Half a dozen studies have found that recipients were more likely to die after receiving blood from a woman than from a man — though the biggest and most recent did not.

Deaths resulting from transfusions are rare, but one cause can be transfusion-related acute lung injury. It has been linked to blood specifically from mothers, especially if the transfusion consisted not of red blood cells but plasma, the liquid portion of blood that contains antibodies. Pregnancy changes a woman’s circulating antibodies, as well as other characteristics of her immune system.